ASA 125th Meeting Ottawa 1993 May

4aSP7. On the perceptual integrality of duration and amplitude cues to
stress.

Alice Turk

James R. Sawusch

Dept. of Psychol., Park Hall, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260

Traditionally, amplitude, duration and F0 have been proposed as
independent cues to stress [D. Fry, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 27, 765--768 (1955)].
However, there is psychoacoustic evidence that the perception of loudness
depends on duration [B. Scharf, ``Loudness,'' in Handbook of Perception, edited
by E. C. Carterette and M. P. Friedman (Academic, New York, 1978), Vol. 4, pp.
187--242]. Beckman proposed the intensity integral as a more appropriate cue to
stress than either amplitude or duration alone [M. Beckman, Stress and
Non-stress Accent (Foris, 1986)]. The present study tested the perceptual
integrality of duration and amplitude using Garner's paradigm [W. R. Garner,
The Processing of Information and Structure (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1974)].
Preliminary results suggest that duration and amplitude are integral. Further,
the integrality is asymmetric: Variation in duration interfered with responding
to amplitude to a greater extent than amplitude variation interfered with
responding to duration. These findings suggest that both duration and energy
(the integral of amplitude over duration) may serve as auditory cues to stress.
[Work supported by NIDCD Grant Nos. R01-DC00291 and T32-DC00036 to SUNY at
Buffalo.]